The Salma Hayek-ification of Writing: A Love Letter to Our Slow-Motion Doom

I’ve done what the pedagogical experts say to do with ChatGPT: assume my students are using it and adjust accordingly. I’ve stopped trying to catch them red-handed and started handing them a red carpet. This isn’t about cracking down—it’s about leaning in. I’ve become the guy in 1975 who handed out TI calculators in Algebra II and said, “Go wild, kids.” And you know what? They did. Math got sexier, grades went up, and nobody looked back.

Likewise, my students are now cranking out essays with the polish of junior copywriters at The Atlantic. I assign them harder prompts than I ever dared in the pre-AI era—ethical quandaries, media critiques, rhetorical dissections of war propaganda—and they deliver. Fast. Smooth. Professional. Too professional.

You’d think I’d be ecstatic. The gap between my writing and theirs has narrowed to a hair’s width. But instead of feeling triumphant, I feel…weirdly hollow. Something’s off.

Reading these AI-enhanced essays is like watching Mr. Olympia contestants on stage—hyper-muscular, surgically vascular, preposterously sculpted. At first, it’s impressive. Then it’s monotonous. Then it’s grotesque. The very thing that was once jaw-dropping becomes oddly numbing.

That’s where we are with writing. With art. With beauty.

There’s a creeping sameness to the brilliance, a too-perfect sheen that repels the eye the way flawless skin in a poorly-lit Instagram filter repels real emotion. Everyone’s beautiful now. Everyone’s eloquent. And like the cruelest of paradoxes, if everyone looks like Salma Hayek, then no one really does.

AI content has the razzle-dazzle of a Vegas revue. It’s slick, it’s dazzling, and it empties your soul faster than a bottomless mimosa brunch. The quirk, the voice, the twitchy little neurosis that makes human writing feel alive? That’s been sanded down into a high-gloss IKEA finish.

What we’re living through is the Salma Hayek-ification of modern life: a technologically induced flattening of difference, surprise, and delight.

We are being beautified into oblivion.

And deep inside, where the soul used to spark when a student wrote a weird, lumpy, incandescent sentence—one they bled for, sweated over—I feel the faint echo of that spark flicker.

I’m not ready to say the machines have killed art. But they’ve definitely made it harder to tell the difference between greatness and a decent algorithm with good taste.